Mysore Palace

Mysore Palace, also called Amba Vilas Palace, stands in the centre of Mysuru in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. It was the official residence of the Wadiyar dynasty and the seat of the Kingdom of Mysore, and it is one of the most visited monuments in India.

An earlier wooden palace caught fire on 20 February 1897; the blaze destroyed about a fifth of it and killed eight people. Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV commissioned the present building, designed by British architect Henry Irwin, and work lasted from 1897 to 1912. The style is Indo-Saracenic, mixing Hindu, Mughal, Rajput and Gothic elements.

The three-storey palace of grey granite has marble domes and a five-storey tower. Highlights inside include the Kalyana Mantapa, the wedding hall with a stained-glass ceiling and peacock-pattern floor, and the Durbar Hall with carved columns. Paintings, the royal armoury and portraits of the family are displayed along the route.

During the Dasara festival in September or October, the palace is the centre of a ten-day celebration ending with a procession of decorated elephants. The palace is lit with about 100,000 bulbs on Sunday evenings and public holidays. Shoes must be left outside, and photography inside is not permitted.

Tickets cost ₹1,000 for foreign visitors and ₹120 for Indian citizens, prices in force since December 2025. The palace drew about four million visitors in the 2023 to 2024 financial year, 112,070 of them during Dasara, so arrive at opening on weekends.

The budget grew as the building did. The first estimate of ₹25 lakh rose to about ₹41.48 lakh by completion. The palace measures about 75 metres across and 48 metres deep over three floors, and the public durbar hall, the Diwan-e-Aam, is 47 metres long and 13 metres wide. Irwin worked with Edwin Wolleston Fritchley on the design. During the nine nights of Navaratri the illumination uses roughly 100,000 bulbs of 15 watts each, and during Dasara the 750-kilogram golden howdah carries the image of the goddess Chamundeshwari. Several temples stand inside the walls, among them the Lakshmiramana, Varahaswami, Prasannakrishna, Bhuvaneshwari and Gayatri temples.